Tasha Williams — CALPADS Coordinator

How do you explain the CALPADS Coordinator role to someone outside a district?

I usually say I help the district tell the state who our students are and what services and outcomes we are responsible for. Then I add that every simple word in that sentence has about forty rules attached to it. CALPADS has a way of humbling you. You can work on a submission for weeks and one field you did not know another department changed can suddenly affect thousands of records.

The job is part reporting, part investigation, part translation, and part relationship management. I need to understand the state requirements, but I also need to understand how information is created at a school front counter, in a counseling office, in special programs, and in HR. The certification is districtwide work even if my name is on the calendar.

How does technology help you lead rather than just submit files?

The submission tools tell me what the state rejected, but leadership starts when I connect that error back to the local process that created it. We use validation dashboards, comparison reports, ticketing, and scheduled extracts so schools and departments can see issues before the certification deadline.

I mean, if I keep all the error knowledge to myself, I can become very busy and very indispensable, but the district does not get better. The technology lets me distribute the information. A principal can see the school’s unresolved issues, a program owner can see missing records, and we can track whether corrections actually reached CALPADS.

What is one improvement you are especially proud of?

We built a certification readiness calendar that worked backward from the deadline and assigned each checkpoint to the person who could actually fix the data. Before that, we had a calendar, but it mostly told everyone when I needed things. That is not the same as a shared process.

We sat down with enrollment, attendance, special education, English learner services, counseling, HR, and school-site staff. For each major report, we identified the source, local validation, owner, and escalation date. We added a simple dashboard—green did not mean perfect, it meant reviewed and within an agreed threshold. During the next certification, the final-week error count was dramatically lower and we did not need the usual weekend correction marathon. I mean, I still checked on Saturday. I am a CALPADS coordinator. But I did not have to rebuild half the submission.

Was there another win at the school-site level?

Yes. We created a network of site data leads. Not a huge committee—one person at each school who understood the local workflow and had scheduled time before major deadlines. We gave them short error guides with examples from our own SIS, not just state documentation. Then we held office hours where people could bring one confusing record and we would trace it together.

The surprise was that the network began helping us find district problems. If five schools had the same error, they stopped assuming they had all made the same mistake. They would say, “Could this be the extract?” That improved trust. Schools were not just receiving correction lists from the district office; they were part of diagnosing the system.

What makes CALPADS leadership difficult?

The deadline can encourage bad behavior. When certification is close, the temptation is to patch the reported value so the error disappears. But if the correction is not made in the authoritative source, it comes back—or worse, the state report is clean while the district system remains wrong.

There is also a fear issue. People hear “state reporting” and worry that one mistake will become a public crisis. I have to create urgency without creating panic. If staff hide a problem because they think they will be blamed, I learn about it later when it is much harder to fix.

How do you communicate technical rules to school staff?

I try to begin with the student story. Instead of saying “fatal certification validation,” I might say, “The state sees this student enrolled at two schools on the same date, and here is what happened locally.” Then the rule makes sense.

I also separate what a person needs to know from what I need to know. A registrar does not need the entire file specification to correct an enrollment date. They need the definition, the local screen, a realistic example, and where to ask for help. I guess what I would say is that expertise is not proving you know every code. It is making the right part of that knowledge usable to someone else.

Where does data governance enter the process?

CALPADS exposes governance gaps very quickly. If two departments use different program definitions, the submission forces a choice. If nobody owns a field, the error sits until the deadline. If staff correct data in the wrong system, the next extract overwrites it.

We now document owners for critical elements and use certification questions to improve our data dictionary. We also bring recurring errors to the governance council. Some errors are training. Some are configuration. Some are policy. Treating every error as a person typing something wrong is both unfair and ineffective.

What advice would you give a new CALPADS Coordinator?

First, build relationships before you need a correction at four o’clock on certification day. Learn who understands enrollment, course scheduling, special programs, assessment, and HR. Respect school-office staff; they know where the data is born.

Second, keep notes. The error that takes you three hours to understand today will return next year wearing a slightly different hat. And finally, do not celebrate only the successful certification. Ask what the district learned, what manual work can be removed, and which source process should change. Getting the green certification button is important. Building a district that produces better information the next time is the leadership work.

Reflective questions

1. Which departments and school-site roles contribute to your district’s CALPADS certifications?
2. Does your reporting calendar assign correction ownership or merely announce deadlines?
3. How can a district create urgency without making staff hide errors?
4. Which recurring validation errors indicate training, configuration, or policy problems?
5. How could local examples make state documentation more usable for school staff?
6. What should the district learn after certification beyond whether the submission was accepted?